Several acoustic cues (separately or combined) form the perceptual construct of a voicing distinction between voiced and voiceless stops.
It has been claimed that the long established neutralization of the voicing distinction in domain final position in German is phonetically incomplete.
Even in the absence of both voicing maintenance during stop closure and a burst, the acoustic cues vowel duration and stop duration guaranteed stable voicing distinction in EP.
Regarding the interplay of several acoustic cues, Francis et al. [7] studied English simultaneous variation and cue weighting in the stop voicing distinction.
None of the examined acoustic cues appeared to be used by Italian listeners to obtain a robust voicing distinction, thus pointing to the use of other acoustic cues or combination of other cues to guarantee stable voicing distinction in this language.
The stimuli used in our perception experiments were designed to exclude the burst cue (i.e. to exclude both burst and voicing onset time cues) to examine the influence of voicing maintenance and durational cues on stop voicing distinction.
However, examining the interplay and cue weighting of other acoustic cues was not the focus of this study; but based on other languages, burst and VOT have an important effect on stop voicing distinction [2, 6, 36].
In summary, this study constitutes new evidence that, in the absence of a facilitating burst, multiple acoustic cues are used and combined with different cue weighting to obtain a stable stop voicing distinction for EP.
A strong language dependency of the three factors on listeners' voicing distinction was found, with high sensitivity for all three cues for EP listeners and low sensitivity for Italian listeners.
For stops in medial position, the classical definition of a voiced stop is voicing during closure[6]: intervocalic stops usually have voicing during closure in a number of languages, which influences perception [6, 7]; however, other acoustic cues like stop duration[7] and preceding vowel duration[8] strongly contribute to voicing distinction.
